Stylish flight attendant happily tosses HUNDREDS of clothes to make space in the incredible 150-square-foot 'tiny home' that she built inside a converted trailer in Florida (20 Pics)

As a flight attendant, Lissette Arroyo has an ideal lifestyle for a tiny-home trailer: She's on the road a lot, she can be based out of any major city, and she wears a uniform to work, so — in theory — she doesn't need a closet stocked with tons and tons of work clothes. But the 30-year-old realized her wardrobe was out of control after she moved into her dream 150-square-foot space in Orlando, Florida about a year ago. She says she had "600-700" pieces of clothing, and most of it had to go so she could live without clutter.

Before moving to Orlando for family reasons, Arroyo, who was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Connecticut, lived in a small apartmentin New York City for seven months in 2016. But she found the rent and cost of living too high and, because she was already accustomed to an itty-bitty living space, began wondering what life in a tiny home would be like. She decided to look into Tiny Heirloom, the builders featured in the Tiny Luxury series on the HGTV & DIY networks.

Despite having already lived in a less-than 600-square-foot place in NYC, it still took around three months to declutter enough to feel comfortable in her even-smaller digs. The hardest part of the minimizing process was discarding "huge heaps of garbage bags and boxes [of clothes]," she says. "Along with storage in my apartment, I also had a storage unit in NYC and clothing left over at my mother's home." She got rid of nearly all of it.

Arroyo's home has one slim closet space, which she uses for dresses, skirts, and jackets, and "so many drawers," which are used for her smaller items, like T-shirts, although she tries to use only four of them for clothes. She downsized the number of items in her closet from 600 to 700 to just 74, including 10 pairs of shoes, 10 tops, nine dresses, seven skirts, four pairs of pants, three jackets, 23 miscellaneous accessories — like hats and scarves — and a few pieces of jewelry.Arroyo says owning fewer things works well for her, because she wears her flight-attendant uniform to work and never has to worry about what to wear on the job.

Of the early days spent getting rid of her garments, Arroyo says, "I brought all of my crap in my tiny house and was like, Oh my gosh, I have a lot of crap." Hard to justify, since she freely admits she only wore a small portion of her massive wardrobe."Now, my closet consists only of the things that I like. Not just-in-case items, not I-might-wear-this-one-day things. I'm still getting rid of stuff, but I've made progress. I actually have empty spaces and drawers that aren't in use in my house! I decided I want to have space for the things I enjoy, like snowboarding. I need room for gear, not outfits."

Stylish flight attendant happily tosses HUNDREDS of clothes to make space in the incredible 150-square-foot 'tiny home' that she built inside a converted trailer in Florida (20 Pics)
Reviewed by Your Destination
on
January 26, 2018
Rating: 5